A brave man who wants atheism in the future calls himself an atheist; a brave man who wants socialism, socialist; a brave man who wants Catholicism, Catholic. But a coward who doesn’t know what he wants in the future calls himself a futurist. (G.K Chesterton).
Just a couple of days ago, the umpteenth piece of news about the search for ‘the fountain of youth’ broke into the press. Apparently, Tech mogul Bryan Johnson, 45, leads a team of doctors and specialists whose goal is to return his body to the age of 18 (destining 2 million dollars annually for this). The massive cultural products (ticket offices of all kinds) account for the growing interest in an ideology that is presented as new, but in reality it is not so new: transhumanism. It has been cooking over a slow heat, from the dialogues Platonic to blockbusters like Matrix.
The British sociologist Steve Fuller warned us that “although the current transhumanist projects are not proceeding according to plan, they are nurturing a culture that needs to see them come true and, therefore, [el capital] is willing to finance them on an ongoing basis”. Let’s not be naive, the big technology corporations, as well as computer gurus and the culture industry, seem to be rowing in the same direction: filtering a worldview of techno-fetishist progress (ie: political conflicts are resolved thanks to the always beneficial technological innovations).
For this to come to fruition, there must be an active collaboration between businessmen, computer scientists, physicists, venture capital funds, writers, philosophers, sociologists, law and bioethics professors, magazine editors such as Peter Thiel, Dimitry Itskov, Bill Marris, Larry Ellison, Elon Musk, Sean Parker, Peter Diamandis… Ray Kurzweil, Nick Bostrom, Max More, James Hughes, Glenn Raynolds, Ronald Bailey, among others. A paradigmatic case of this “optimism” is the so-called University of the Singularity (Singularity University). What is it about? We are talking about a quasi-academic institution based in Silicon Valley whose purpose is “to bring together, educate and inspire a group of leaders who strive to understand and facilitate the exponential development of technologies and promote, apply, guide and guide these tools to solve the great challenges of humanity”.
The problem is how these elites prioritize their priorities among these great challenges. In the words of the doctor in Economics, Santiago Armesilla: “the Silicon Valley bourgeoisie is more focused on being immortal than on hungerepidemics, absolute and relative poverty or social inequalities on the planet (…) transhumanism, for them, is the ideology consistent with the next phase of capitalism”.
A couple of years ago, the physicist and billionaire Elon Musk announced that he was testing a microchip (developed by Neuralink) that was intended to end diseases such as dementia, Parkinson’s or spinal cord injuries and even control smart devices with the mind (something like a home automation-telekinetic). Both the ‘Bryan Johnson case’ and the ‘Musk case’ are expressions of a tremendous fear of death whose reckless solution is the abolition of something that is constitutive of human beings: suffering.
Peter Thiel (founder of Paypal), a well-known philanthropist, for example, sold his company in 2002 and began to invest wildly in biotechnology, since, in his words: “It is possible, and necessary, to eradicate aging, and even death“. Although it seems impossible, there are more bizarre examples: Dimitry Itskov, promoter of the Avatar project, affirmed that “we will become beings of light”. His project is to perpetuate the individual (experience) and human consciousness in hardware that stores them (such as if they were hard drives) to overcome organic death like this. And they will wonder… Where have I heard this before? Basically, it is the plot of the movie Transcendence (starring Johnny Depp). Sometimes reality surpasses fiction.
Silicon Valley against the concept of humanity
Among all these false prophets, there is at least one who openly acknowledges that the engine of this ideology is fear. This is Ray Kurzweil, writer and scientist (and inspirer of the transhumanist movement). In his opinion: “around the year 2045 the capacity of computers will surpass human brainsand the only way we could get past that critical moment would be by improving our biology.”
Beyond the obscure eugenic and Malthusian intentions that may be behind the transhumanist debate, what is worrying is the anthropological mutation project that the lords of the world are seeking
Bryan Johnson, Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, Dimitry Itskov or Ray Kurzweil cannot be understood without the nihilist roots of the futurist avant-garde headed by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti and his founding text, the futurist manifesto (1909). Futurism is roughly an “aesthetic of violence and blood“. We must not stop only at the proto-fascist rants, the manifest misogyny and the contempt for tradition, but also take note of the fact that the futurist manifesto laid the theoretical foundations of current transhumanism. As a noucento avant-garde, the proposal of the Italian and his executors was to viscerally respond to the end-of-the-century and civilizational crisis that was plunging his beloved homeland, Italy, into decadence.
Thus, human, all too human! It is that transcendent force imprinted on Man that pushes us to eagerly pursue the ghost of immortality. AND beyond the obscure eugenic and Malthusian intentions that may be behind the transhumanist debate, what is worrying is the anthropological mutation project that the lords of the world are seeking. If techno-scientific advances were available to abolish human suffering, they would put an end to the human species as we know it.
We are approaching by leaps and bounds towards a social pathology based on the absolute inability to feel the suffering of others as one’s own, based, ultimately, on the ontological inversion of “Nothing human is alien to me” (Homo sum, human nihil to me fucking alienum) of Terence.
I can only show my admiration for the brilliant and prophetic words of Gilbert K. Chesterton, who shortly after the publication of the futurist manifestostood in the way of Marinetti and his followers: “the warriors of the past liked tournaments, which were at least dangerous for themselves, while the futurists like racing cars, which are above all alarming for others “.
